New Format: Sportsmanship
God I hate the zot decks: Half of the cards are destroy or damage instants. The other half are counterspells, exile, and sacrifice cards.
Blah blah blah—it’s legal and you have the same right to employ these cards blah blah blah. If I have to take time to explain to someone the difference to returning a serve and making sure your opponent has no racket, that person is not yet worth the time.
I get that MTG creates the need for these cards with insane power escalations in each new release, but that can be solved with a new format called something like “sportsmanship” or “paladin” or something.
In this format, game-ender cards are limited to four per deck (yep, there will be have to be some decisions on what counts as a game-ender, but you can almost certainly name a few off the top of your head, and similar decisions are already having to be made for other formats), and zot cards (destroy, counterspell, exile, return-to-hand, opponent sacrifices) are similarly constrained to four per deck.
That way, sure, if your opponent has a “lucky” draw of all four of their zot cards in their opening hand, at least you can see a light at the end of that tunnel, and choose to persevere rather than drop out because nobody has any interest in babysitting some asshat’s control issues.
And if they don’t like this format, they can play DEATHKILL9000 Format all they like and rage on.
This format could also include rewards for completing games even if it means your defeat, and social filtering for the ******** who walk away from the machine when they’re losing, as seen in other suggestions on this forum. It would be a format for competition and sportsmanship rather than control and total war.
I know we’re dealing with a lot of formats already, but all my investment in this game; my ability to recommend it to others; feels questionable when I have to deal with these kinds of decks daily.